Staying Alive: Movie Review

Director: Ananth Narayan Mahadevan
Cast: Saurabh Shukla, Ananth Narayan Mahadevan

Some stories are best suited for theatre, novels or tele-films. They lack the scale and density for a feature film. Anant Mahadevan's well-intentioned film Staying Alive falls in that category.

The story is about two men who suffer a heart attack and share the hospital room. Aditya (Ananth Mahadevan) is a newspaper editor who has already survived two strokes in the past and has somewhat adapted to the crisis. Shaukat Ali (Saurabh Shukla), an underworld kingpin who has often witnessed death closely, gets paranoid with his first heart-attack. The story is about their interactions and exchange of ideas in the ICU room that changes Ali's perspective towards life.

The film is more or less a single-setting drama largely happening in the hospital room and intermittently cutting into flashbacks. But what brings more monotony is Sujit Sen's one-dimensional screenplay, with the verbose drama between the two patients not leading to anywhere. The wordplay is mostly about the art of living or the smaller joys of life that never have a bigger meaning. Outside the hospital room, their wives try to console each other almost initiating a soap-opera of sorts.

The characters are directly introduced at the hospital and aren't established enough that you would feel for them. Like Shaukat Ali's criminal activities, in the first place, never dawn on you that you would want him to mend ways in life. The film attempts to be a simple drama without any twists or turns making it more predictable fare. But at the heart of it, the gist of the story is the conversational chemistry between the two characters that leads to the mobster's change of heart by the climax. Unfortunately this expected rapport between the two never registers, making the core conflict of the film hollow.

The idea of inducing emotions in the climax through humane conduct with an impassive coma-patient has been already employed to better effect in Rajkumar Hirani's Munnabhai MBBS. Also a melodramatic end to the story was pretty-much avoidable.

The film works, to an extent, only because of Saurabh Shukla, who largely tries to make up for the lack of his character-development and shallowness in script with his 'lively' act of the paranoid patient. Ananth Mahadevan is too idealistic in his act. This is amongst Chandan Roy Sanyal's early acts. The actor seems raw and has an Imtiaz Ali hangover in his hairstyle. Navni Parihar and Sunita fill in as the soapy female leads.